Nitrogen?

I love stout, especially draught style, now I know that brands like Guinness have a nitrogen distributor in the bottle to ensure that creamy style head. Is there any way I can brew a stout to have this same consistency?

No and Yes and sort-of. The widget technology is outside of what a homebrewer can manage. You can keg and use a nitrogen/CO2 mix with a stout tap OR you can get fairly close by adding champagne yeast to your priming bucket. I have found that this yeast does a good job of producing the tiny bubbles that gives you that creamy head.

So I would just use my regular yeast for the fermentation process and champagne yeast for the priming bucket? How much yeast would I need to use and is there any risk of kicking off another fermentation and having a blowout/bottle bomb? Does it affect the taste at all?

Sorry for all the questions, i'm just excited that there may be a solution.

Most of my beers are nitro and David pretty much summed it up. Brew your beer as usual and just serve it with beer gas and a nitro faucet.

ochocki said:

So I would just use my regular yeast for the fermentation process and champagne yeast for the priming bucket?

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Yup.

ochocki said:

How much yeast would I need to use and is there any risk of kicking off another fermentation and having a blowout/bottle bomb? Does it affect the taste at all?


Sorry for all the questions, i'm just excited that there may be a solution.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure how much to add, probably the dry package, after you have rehydrated it. Fermentation depends on fermentable sugars being available - not the amount of yeast present.

As far as taste goes, I would think the champagne yeast would dry it out a bit, but shouldn't really have too much affect.

Right D_42?

And you can use the poor mans nitro.
Just use a syringe (clean of course) to draw a sample
of beer from your glass and inject it back into the glass.
The nitro would come from the air.

Not as good as nitro from the tap or widget, but it
do work.

ochocki said:

I love stout, especially draught style, now I know that brands like Guinness have a nitrogen distributor in the bottle to ensure that creamy style head. Is there any way I can brew a stout to have this same consistency?

Click to expand...

There is no "nitrogen distributor" in a bottle of Guiness, although there is a widget. No, the widget does NOT contain nitrogen. The widget contains Guiness. If you really want to know how it works, look it up on the 'net, but the widget is just a method to churn up the stout and produce the thick creamy head.

Why nitrogen with stouts? Stouts are traditionally served with that thick, creamy head - but it's not from the nitrogen. That head is produced, on tap, from the restrictor plates in the Stout tap that churn up the beer. They use nitrogen/CO2 mixed to provide enough pressure to push the beer through the tap. If they used straight CO2, the pressures needed to push through the taps would overcarbonate what is traditionally a very lightly carbed beer. So they cut back on the CO2, and added nitrogen, as very little nitrogen dissolves into the beer.

So it's not really the nitrogen that causes the thick creamy head, but the tap (or in the bottles, the widget) that is responsible for it.

Ok, so I took the advise and looked the Guinness widget up on the internet. One site said that a small amount of liquid nitrogen is injected into the Guinness before it is sealed in the bottle. So my question is has anybody tried this and if not how much liquid nitrogen do you think it would take?

If you're willing to spend the bucks for a nitrogen cylinder and regulator, why don't you just spring for a simple kegging setup as well? I'm not bashing your idea, and it'd be interesting to see if you have any success with nitrogen in bottles. However, the whole idea behind the widget is to make bottled beer taste/feel more like draft beer. My vote is just to make draft beer!

Salizar said:

Ok, so I took the advise and looked the Guinness widget up on the internet. One site said that a small amount of liquid nitrogen is injected into the Guinness before it is sealed in the bottle. So my question is has anybody tried this and if not how much liquid nitrogen do you think it would take?

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If you care to make a few bottle bombs that are likely to go off in your hands, go for it. Me, I don't care to pick the glass out of my body.

You can count on Guiness knowing the EXACT amount of liquid nitrogen to put in the bottle. They also have an automatic capper that probably caps the bottle almost immediately, as the nitrogen will likely evaporate very quickly. You, on the other hand, won't have that advantage. If you do manage to get the cap on quick enough to trap any nitrogen, you'll likely have bottles fragging on you left and right. Let's not mention how much fun you'll have trying to fish the widget out of the Guiness bottles, sanitize the little boogers then put them back in.

I agree - getting a stout kegging system/stout tap is the much easier, not to mention safer, route.

Not to mention that liquid nitrogen boils at about -200C (-320F) so getting any on your skin would be about as bad as picking out the glass pieces. Also the equipment needed to handle the stuff is very specialized (read costly) so I would recommend using, as mentioned earlier, the beer gas with a stout faucet.

Another option if you don't have the space to to go with a kegging system a Tap a Draft system offers the ability to have both a CO2 and a Nitrogen capsule running at the same time which would accomplish the effect you are searching for.

Welcome to Beer-Wine.com

the equipment to which I refer is on this page.

Wow, this thread was dug up from the depths.

McKBrew said:

Wow, this thread was dug up from the depths.

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In that spirit...

My understanding is that Nitrogen does not diffuse into the beer, but rather you carbonate with CO2, and N only pushes the beer through.

But I must be missing a piece here. The dip tube takes beer from the bottom of the keg (with apparently no N in it) up dip tube, through tubing, through tap, into glass. How does N get into your glass?

I know a lot of the foamy, creamy result is due to the high serving pressure and the pressure plate with small holes found in a stout tap, and not just due to N. But I assume you'd get a different result with this setup if you served with CO2 (otherwise we'd just use CO2). But why?

Dang this is an old thread lol. Last post 12 years ago. jack I have a nitro set up and was under the impression that Nitro doesnt dissolve into the beer either . I never thought about the dip tube being submerged so if it doesnt dissolve into the beer how does it come out of the tap? Now you've peaked my intrest. Could it be that the Nitro is in the beer but when the pressure is released as it pours in the glass ?

There was a good talk on serving nitro beers at homebrew con last year. If you have the AHA membership you can stream, but in short, yes you do get some dissolution of N into beer, the cascading effect of the pour is from your nitrogen coming out of solution. You should still use CO2 to target 1-1.2 volume CO2 (which means you need to carb at room temp). Then the hard part is getting the N into solution. I have a keg lid with a diffusion stone attachment that I run pure N through at 35-40 PSI, then push with 70/30 blend.

https://www.homebrewersassociation....he-science-and-methods-of-beer-nitrogenation/

Not sure if you can watch the seminar but I uploaded the pdf too (hope this works!)

Will definitely check those out. Your link went to two videos, which are cued up. Judging from the PDF, these are going to be very informative. Thanks!

Jag75 said:

Dang this is an old thread lol. Last post 12 years ago. jack I have a nitro set up and was under the impression that Nitro doesnt dissolve into the beer either . I never thought about the dip tube being submerged so if it doesnt dissolve into the beer how does it come out of the tap? Now you've peaked my intrest. Could it be that the Nitro is in the beer but when the pressure is released as it pours in the glass ?

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Looks like there's a lot to it, but as you saw the short answer is "Well, there's SOME Nitro in the beer."